CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE.
Omnes comitatus, hundrede, wapentakii, et trethingic, sint ad antiquas firmas absque ullo incremento, exceptis dominicis maneriis nostris.
All counties, hundreds, wapentakes, and trithings (except our demesne manors) shall remain at the old rents, and without any additional payment.
This provision also was directed against the sheriffs, and shows a praiseworthy determination to get to the root of the disease, instead of merely attacking the symptoms. The rents at which the counties (or parts of them) were farmed out to the sheriffs must no longer be arbitrarily raised, but were to remain at the old figures which had become stereotyped from long usage. To understand how such increases would injuriously affect the inhabitants of the county, some explanation is necessary. Centuries before the Norman Conquest, the long process had been already completed by which England had been gradually mapped out into shires on lines substantially the same as those which still exist. Each county had been further subdivided into smaller districts known as “hundreds” in the south, and as “wapentakes” in the Danish districts of the north; while intermediate divisions existed, exceptionally, in some of the specially large counties such as York and Lincoln, each of which had three “trithings” or ridings.
In commenting upon chapter 24, it has been already explained how the Anglo-Saxon kings entrusted their interests in each shire to an officer called a sheriff, and how a similar officer under the Norman kings became practically the chief magistrate and local judge in the county. His financial duties, however, long remained the most important: William I. and his successors had greater pecuniary interests in the English counties than their Anglo-Saxon forerunners ever had, and the sheriffs were their agents in collecting all rents and other dues. Even before the Conquest, however, the sheriff of an ordinary county had ceased to be a mere intermediary, who lifted the king’s rents and paid over, pound by pound, the yearly varying sums he might receive. He had become a firmarius: he bought for a yearly rent the right to collect and appropriate to his own uses the various revenues of the county. The Crown got only the exact sum stipulated for, known as the firma comitatus; while the balance, if any, remained with the sheriff. That officer was liable, on the other hand, for the sum agreed on, even when the annual yield fell short of his anticipations. In plain words, the sheriff speculated in the returns, and it was his business, by fair means or foul, to make sure of a handsome surplus.
Authorities differ as to the exact list of items purchased by the slump sum known as firma comitatus; but undoubtedly the two chief sources of revenue embraced were the profits of justice dispensed in the local courts, and the rents and returns from the various royal manors in the county.
William I. sharply raised the amounts of all these farms for his own benefit, and his successors endeavoured, whenever possible, to increase them still further. Now it might seem at first sight that these additional burdens concerned exclusively the Crown and the sheriff, but such was by no means the case. The sheriff took care to pass on the burden primarily falling upon him to the shoulders of those who were subject to his authority. When the king exacted more from the sheriff, the latter in turn increased the pressure on the inhabitants of his county or group of counties. His rule tended always to be oppressive, but his unjust fines and exactions would be doubled at times when the amount of the firma had recently been raised.
Under the vigilant rule of Henry II. some measure of relief was obtained by the shires from the misdeeds of their local tyrants, since that far-seeing king knew that his own best interests called for a curtailment of the pretensions of the sheriffs. He punished their excesses, and frequently deprived them of office. Under John the sheriffs had a comparatively free hand to oppress their victims, for he entered into a tacit alliance with them, in order that the two tyrants (the heads of the central and the local government respectively) might together fleece the men of the county more effectually. In addition to the fixed annual rents in name of firma which had again become stereotyped, John extorted an additional lump payment called either an incrementum or by various other names, and allowed the sheriffs to inflict new severities in order to recoup themselves for their additional outlay.[[662]]
Magna Carta made no attempt to abolish the practice of farming out the shires, but forbade alike the increase of the farm and the exaction of an incrementum.
If this reform benefited the men of the counties in their dealings with the sheriffs, it also gave the sheriffs an unfair advantage over the exchequer. The total value of the various assets included in the firma comitatus had greatly increased in the past, and would probably continue to increase in the future. Therefore, it was absurd to bind the Crown by a hard-and-fast rule which would practically make a present of this future “unearned increment” to the sheriff. It belonged of right to the Crown; and the exchequer had increasing need of supplies to meet the increasing duties of the central government. To stereotype the firma to be paid in return for a constantly increasing revenue was unfair to the Crown.[[663]] It is thus easy to understand why this chapter was entirely omitted in 1216 and in subsequent reissues. The Articuli super cartas, on the other hand, while conceding to the counties the right of electing their own sheriffs, reaffirmed the principle of John’s Charter, declaring that neither the bailiwicks and hundreds of the king, nor those of great lords ought to be put to farm at too high rates. The evil, however, continued under a new form; sheriffs, while only paying a moderate farm themselves, sublet parts of their province at much higher rates, thus appropriating the increment denied to the exchequer, while the bailiffs who had paid the increase could not “levy the said ferm without doing extortion and duress to the people.”[[664]] Three successive acts prohibited this practice, declaring that hundreds and wapentakes must either be kept in the sheriff’s own hands, or sublet, if at all, at the old fixed farms only.[[665]]
One exception to the scope of its own provisions was deliberately made by Magna Carta—an exception of an important and notable nature; the demesne manors of the Crown were deliberately left exposed to arbitrary increases of their annual rents. The towns in this respect were practically in the same position as the demesne manors. It is true that many of them had received separate charters fixing the amounts annually payable under the name of farm (firma burgi in their case), and that all such charters received a general confirmation in chapter 13 of the Great Charter, but the Crown could probably evade these promises by applying the name of “increment” to any additional payments desired, or, if that were objected to, might still resort to an arbitrary “tallage,” the right to extort which had not been taken away by Magna Carta. The money was as good to the Crown under one name as under another.[[666]]
[662]. Cf. Miss Norgate (John Lackland, p. 214) who explains that the Crown claimed a share of the sheriffs’ ever-increasing surplus, and "this was done, not by putting the ferm at a higher figure, but by charging the sheriff with an additional lump sum under the title of crementum, or, in John’s time, proficuum.“ But this practice was by no means an innovation invented by John. Henry II. often exacted such extra payments under the name of ”gersuma." Thus in Pipe Roll Henry II. (p. 11) the Sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk paid 200 marks under that name. The method adopted was practically to set up the office of sheriff to auction. The highest suitable bidder obtained the post, and the amount of the successful bid was entered at the exchequer as a gersuma.
[663]. Cf. Sir James Ramsay, Angevin Empire, 476, who describes this provision as “an impossible requirement.” Dr. Stubbs’ paraphrase is not entirely happy: “the ferms of the counties and other jurisdictions are not to be increased.” See Const. Hist. I. 575.
[664]. These are the words of the Statute of 1330, cited below.
[665]. See 4 Edward III. c. 15; 14 Edward III. c. 9; and 4 Henry IV. c. 5.